Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add web content regularly to automatically bring more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of this process. We explain what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different than a professionally configured website. You will also discover how much work needs to be done to ensure that when everything is set up and configured, you can automatically start getting new traffic just by posting new content regularly to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive worldwide and are looking for any advantage they believe will increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website allows their business to get off to a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to describe the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here is a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
Everything is moving along in the widget plant when things suddenly stop.
No one can figure out what’s gone wrong and so the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly afterwards and, without uttering a word, heads straight towards the control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for no more than 3 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and makes a gentle tap near the left corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything returns to normal.
The manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a service bill for $5,000.
With a sense of outrage, the manager picks up the phone and dials the expert. Why were they expected to pay such a ridiculously high fee for less than 5 minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for having spent years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
While the solution to many problems may seem quite easy once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure in order to make sure everything works as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and time-consuming. It’s not as simple as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a button, or configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your web site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like implementing server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and online services.
External Sites And Accounts – Configuration
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all of your content should be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external services into your traffic network, content linking back to your site will be automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your website will then be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of the external sites will need to be set up before configuring your site’s settings to speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google Webmaster Tools, you can use this information with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, tracking information can be added to WordPress using plugins used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account is with Bing are set up, use your information with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media accounts before you can configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are many different solutions that can be added to your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section lists only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to instantly notify all the update services you have listed in the Update Services area when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to sites linked to from your posts, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your sites is something you cannot ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with their social networks can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with WordPress plugins)
There are many social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring Settings – WordPress Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your website, many themes also include options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings for improved traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Other Sections
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online, it’s important that your site complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
For a detailed article on why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, see this article:
Tags & Categories
Post tags & categories help search engines better classify and index your pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags you have set up.
HTML Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover more of your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is code that only search engines can understand. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget To Configure This Too!
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong URL or click on an invalid hyperlink, they will typically be presented with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 Error Page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to drive traffic is post great content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some web professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an article series designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-driven website and proven online marketing strategies.
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